Behind green eyes
by csfcsf
Summary: Because there are little things only Sherlock himself can explain (and he won't). All one-scenes, varying lengths. Written from Sherlock's personal POV. So far, more analytic than action-based. More categories may be added.
1. Chapter 1

_**.**_

I look up, over my computer screen. There's John, hesitant at the centre of the living room, tense shoulder muscles. The soldier pose. Stern washed out features, determined unfocused gaze, something is bothering him. I doubt he's seeing 221B at the moment, his mind seems to belong somewhere else at the moment. As I see clearly his physical presence by the coffee table, the pale morning sunlight bathing his blond greying hair, the skull artwork on the wall just over his shoulder reminding me of the load metaphorically carried by those shoulders. The left one is practically stiff from the effort to brake the tremors that still spontaneously create in his left hand. He's learnt to control them by now, and he thinks I can't tell when he's focusing hard to make them stop, internalising one of his biggest tells.

Something is up. The tremor has been absent these past few weeks.

He's about to make himself a cup of tea – coping mechanism #1. He'll probably make me a cup as well. He doesn't ask me if I want one anymore. He just makes two, sometimes even a toast (a single one, he rarely has one this early in the morning) to induce me to eat more when I'm on a case.

He's worrying about me and I'm worrying about him. _How quaint._ _Sentiment._

_I can never let him know I go in for Sentiment every once in a while now._

Specially after the Fall.

And the Absence.

John has finally accepted his fate and he moves silently towards the kitchen to prepare the two cups of tea. I follow his movements by the corner of my eye, I don't want to pressure him just yet.

Mary insisted that John should come around to Baker Street once in a while. Old times' sake, she tells him. _Sentiment, John finds it logical._ She knows better than to tell me that. She tells me nothing, I take what I can get of the fuller 221B I miss, of the old days. _No, scratch that, delete, I miss nothing, sentiment is abhorrent._

_Sentiment is seeping through my pores as I see John. He's not happy. I can't reach him._

John takes hold of another sigh, imprisoning it deep inside. He just stirs the tea to dissolve the sugar – my mug then. _Three left handed concentric circles, gradually smaller, clockwise, as usual._ He clicks the spoon down, grabs the sugared coffee to bring it over.

I need to talk to him. I need to ask him something. He'd do that for me. Don't know what to say. Talk about what is troubling him. _Talk about his nightmares. Scratch that. Don't EVER bring that up. Don't talk about his nightmares. Don't talk, keep quiet. Silent is best._

John puts down my mug at the table, close to my right hand. Attentive. Probably thinks I didn't catch on his offering before.

I look over to him but he's already turn, leaving. I missed my chance. I still don't know what to say, how to breach the subject. I know what his nightmare was about. It's the only one of the three nightmares that lingers. The one that the sight of a familiar 221B can't smooth away as fast.

This is not the fiery hot desert in combat one.

This is not the exploding shoulder pain and realization that all is lost one.

John is taking his seat on his armchair. Still abhorrently silent, lost unfocused gaze on the morning light outside the window.

This one is about the Fall.

He knows that it was faked, a trick. It should have ended. _Scratch that – it should have never started. Delete that – delete all of it. Delete his memories too. ERROR – invalid command. Damn!_

'John...'

It was my voice, but it trailed off as I didn't know what to say. Maybe my voice was too weak. He didn't show signs of reaction. My voice couldn't reach him where his mind is, too far.

'John.'

My voice is stronger now, breaching the distance.

He looks back at me, slightly startled in his blue eyes.

My words fail me. Somehow he still rewards me with a smile. A quirky twist of the lips that doesn't spread into his eyes or his soul. A knowledgeable smile. He seems to have understood my unspoken words.

'A new case there, Sherlock?' he asks me, helping me, breaching the distance, filling 221B with a new warm start.

John always says the right things.

His unspoken words heeling us both.

'Indeed. Want to take a look, John?'

'Need a doctor's opinion?'

I nod. Despite the fact that it's a Three out of Ten. And it's a blackmail. In the City. And no medical issue in sight.

I change pages before John reaches me, and I show him a Seven I solved last week. A poisoning case in Sussex. He'll probably notice. _Seven minutes, thirty seconds before he notices._

John looks at the crime scene photographs earnestly. He doesn't flinch at the gruesome pictures. He's seen worst. There's a slight crinkle at the corner of his eyes, he's empathetic with the victims and their families. _Three minutes, seventeen seconds._

'Twin brothers?' he understands of the two victims what Scotland Yard didn't see until I pointed out the hair dye on one of the victims and the plastic surgery on the nose of the second. The genes dominance traits on the hair line and eye shape should have been an easy clue for the police officers as much as it was for John now.

'Suggesting...?'

'Inheritance issues.' _One minute, twenty seconds._

'Tanned skin, premature wrinkles on the first one shows he lived abroad. A Mediterranean fishing village of Greece, going by his dirt and his clothes', I add the obvious.

'He was called back. To meet someone. His twin brother.'

'There was an appointment to see the dentist in the British brother's phone agenda, John.' _Thirty seconds now._

'It was a poisoning gone wrong. The poisoner poisoned himself as well, by mistake. He had every intention to live longer than his brother.'

'Very well, John.' _Twenty seconds too early._

'You've solved this, Sherlock.'

_There it is._

'So have you.' I try, but it's a lame distraction.

'You've solved this already.'

'Lestrade needed a second opinion from a doctor.' Lame again. Unbelievable. _What happened? Sentiment is getting in the way._

Wait. What?

John is smirking. There is a light in his eyes. His light found a way back. I take a deep breath, I don't even know where all the air is coming from. I didn't know I was almost holding my breath.

'Drink your tea, Sherlock. I'll fix you a toast as well. We both need breakfast.'

I nod calmly, hiding the relief his nagging gives me. _Just this once._

I know he can't help the nightmares or the state they leave him in. Frightened, powerless, hollow, emptied.

They don't happen so often anymore. I can only hope this may have been the last one.

_Hope. The great detective is reduced to hope._

_Strangely, the great detective isn't ashamed to hope, when it comes to John._

'Here, John. Have a look at this Three. It's a blackmail', I invite, vacating the chair in front of the computer for him. 'I'll get those toasts done for us.'

He seems surprised. I pretend I don't see it. He's not fooled. It's starting to feel like old days again.

_**.**_

Disclaimer: I own none of the characters or their previous feats.


	2. Chapter 2

_A/N: A one-off, playing with my personal solution to the mystery of the skull's placement in the background, explored very consistently, especially during series I and II. -csf_

* * *

_**.**_

**The skull in the mantelpiece**

_**.**_

It's a skull. A human skull. We all have one. I have two. What is so bizarre about a cranial and mandible set I have no idea. Mrs Hudson dusts it. Lestrade glances furtively at it, turning his face away immediately in a contemptuous ignoring pose. When Molly first saw it, she gave me a brief smile (hence my assumption that she also had one; easy to come by in her line of work; assumption rejected since). John...

"_It's a skull."_

"_A friend of mine. When I say friend..."_

John Watson is woefully inattentive and yet – despite all his scattered reasoning processes – he often hits the right notes, the key points. Simpler minds would call it instinct, but what is instinct other than the subconscious collection of hints and signs the conscious mind is too busy (with unimportant things) to notice? John is like that. He tends to focus on all the unimportant things. It's really a waste of energy. Then there are all those routines he finds so comforting. Like making us tea. He makes tea a lot.

Yet he refuses to let me record and study his tea making processes. "It's not rocket science", he tells me.

My tea still doesn't taste the same.

Nor does Lestrade's. He's just been here, bringing me more cold cases the Yard is at a loss with. I'd guess he's aiming at a promotion, only I never guess. And it's not necessarily unpleasant to have these cases to solve. It will allow me to muse on all the missed procedures and false leads the Yard falls into on a regular basis.

I'll get to them in a second.

Lestrade handled the skull for the first time today, not even disguising his analysis of the object. _Male, adult, slight wear and tear of the teeth's surface enamel, good overall conservation state, 100% human._ I would have told him what is in plain sight, but then he'd ask me where I got it.

_Early cases, Lestrade._

He left my skull facing the wrong way.

When I'm in deep at troubling cases and I need a soundboard, I make it face my chair.

John is actually better at the job. First and only live human to achieve that. When John is around Baker Street I often let the skull face the other way, dismissed.

Maybe I could call John around for these cold cases. I'm sure I can solve at least one in the time that it takes him to get here. And we can get the criminal, John would hate to miss that.

Besides, this tea is unbearable. That's it. I'll text him.

«John, I think my tea is poisoning me. I require a capable doctor. Come ASAP. –SH»

_**.**_


	3. Chapter 3

_A/N: __Another one-off, that spun itself in my mind for the pleasure of being contrary. -csf _

* * *

_**.**_

_**There's always a case (John) - 1**_

_**.**_

Three times this week I almost lost John. Once, it was a speeding bullet shooting past John's head, just a few millimetres off. Another time, chatty John got delayed talking with some woman on the street and missed out on a terrible car crash half-a-mile away on what is his way home, and at the usual time he passed by that exact spot. Last time, John almost chocked on a piece of toast at breakfast. Three times I believed I was about to spend the rest of my life visiting John at a gravesite.

It was enough to drive any genius mad. At least that's my excuse. That I'm going mad. And that's the reason alone that made me want to remain by John's side every single time he is alone, defenseless. Whether at home, at 221B, at the Yard, or at the supermarket...

_That was just once, not likely to be repeated. Going to the supermarket, not the staying by John's side. I would repeat going to a supermarket with John if there had been danger in some corridor. That just doesn't happen in supermarkets, it's plain boring. Therefore he's safe in supermarkets._

_**.**_

Every time he looks at me with those big round puppy eyes, all shining in admiration, as if I was some sort of hero — just because we caught the Düsseldorf's serial killer — I realise how wonderfully naïve John is. Despite my best efforts, he still sees me as an heroic person and the world as an even battlefield. _John couldn't be more wrong._ Again, he's confusing actions with sentiments. I caught the Düsseldorf killer because it's what I do. And in going after him I left behind several other cases, other murderers about to murder people, innocent people, because I didn't choose their cases, I didn't stop them. I made a choice — not always the most scientific choice, but being _my choice _to make, I can choose the interesting cases first. It's a criteria, just as flawed as any other would be.

_In my youth, I've burnt myself down trying to solve everything, and I still didn't make it. What John can't see is that the human mind is far too evilly imaginative, and crime never ends._

Then again, there's always Scotland Yard. Who knows what they do with all the spare time I give them by doing their job for them?

And the thanks that I get? A bottle of mulled wine at Christmas. No doubt I'd get something on my birthday, but Mycroft took care of sponging those records. He's useful sometimes, Mycroft. _Not that often._

John still finds me heroic everytime we stop a murder, a robbery, a smuggling, a violent assault. I sincerely suspect he'd find me heroic if I saved a cat on top of a tree. How the man who's been to war, and has seen the worst mankind can produce, can still maintain any illusion of good and bad in this egotistical world is beyond me, and beyond any logical reasoning I can achieve. _And reasoning logically is my chosen profession, mind you._

He's John Watson; he's the one mystery I cannot solve. Whenever I think I got onto his way of seeing the world, his actions, his ideas and hopes, he goes off track and surprises me again. _Very annoying. _Sometimes I have the sneaky suspicion he does this "being contrary business" just to miff me. Turns out he doesn't. It's who he is, and he'll explain it logically — well, when I say "logically", I mean in his own flawed type of logic, obviously — and with his explanations it actually makes sense. _How pedestrian, to have the genius here being taught life lessons by a regular guy._

My regular friend.

My best regular friend, too. He said that. Against all expectations.

Surprising me yet again.

And he meant it too. I know he did. John might be one of the first people in my life who doesn't try to come close because he wants something from me, who acts with no hidden intentions. Well, he wants me to be a hero and all that crap, but I've explained to him time and time again heroes don't _exis_—

Well, there's always John himself, I suppose. Cannot really categorise him, I need further data, and inserting him in the hero category may have to do for now.

I think he does all this confusing me with a secret agenda; _he wants to miff me._

That's it, that's him sorted. _Only, it's not sorted at all._

Oh, John's ringing me. I bet this is about me eating, or sleeping, or other homeostasis based tasks. How mundane.

'John? Yes, you are late... Of course there is a case! There's _always_ a case! You are late and in need of making amends. Will you come over at last?' His answer makes me smile. Any other person would shout back at me. John just said Yes, he wants to come over. And he even means it.

I put down my phone in my lap, then take my hands together to my chin. My favourite thinking pose. I need to think. To choose. To select. A case for John.

Nothing too dangerous, though. Can't have a repetition of three-times-narrowly-escaping-death.

_**.**_


End file.
